He Came to Scoff - 1

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

    One of the usual visitors at the session had brought with him a friend and introduced him to Maharaj as a man with a very keen intellect who would not take anything for granted and who would question everything before accepting it. Maharaj said he was happy to meet such a person. The new visitor was a professor of mathematics.

    Maharaj suggested that it would perhaps be best for the two of them to have a dialogue without assumptions of any kind; right from the basic level. Would he like that? The visitor must have been most pleasantly surprised at this offer. He said he was delighted at the suggestion.

M: Now, tell me, you are sitting before me here and now. What exaclty do you think you are?

V: I am a male human being, forty-nine years old, with certain physical measurements and with certain hopes and aspirations.

M: What was your image about yourself 10 years ago? Same as it is now? And when you were 10 years old? And when you were an infant? And even before that? Has not your image about yourself changed all the time?

V: Yes, what I considered as my identity has been changing all the time.

M: And yet, is there not something, when you think about yourself - deep down - that has not changed?

V: Yes, there is, though I cannot specify what exactly it is.

M: Is it not the simple sense of being, the sense of existing, the sense of presence? If you were not conscious, would your body exist for you? Would there be any world for you? Would there by any question of God or the Creator?

V: This is certainly something to ponder. But tell me, please, how do you see yourself?

M: I am this-I-am, or if you prefer I am that-I-am.

V: I am sorry, but I don't understand.

M: When you say "I think I understand", it is all wrong. When you say "I don't understand" that is absolutely true. Let me make it simpler: I am the conscious presence - not this individual or that, but Conscious Presence, as such.

V: Now again I was about to say I think I understand! But you have just said that this is wrong. You are not deliberately trying to get me confused, are you?

M: On the contrary, I am telling you the exact position. Objectively, I am all that appears in the mirror of consciousness. Absolutely, I am that. I am the consciousness in which the world appears.

V: I am afraid I don't see that. All I can see is what appears before me.

M: Would you be able to see what appears before you if you were not conscious? No. Is all existence, therefore, not purely objective inasmuch as you exist only in my consciousness, and I in yours? Is it not clear that our experience of one another is limited to an act of cognition in consciousness? In other words, what we call our existence is merely in the mind of someone else and therefore only conceptual? Ponder over this too.

V: Are you trying to tell me that we are all mere phenomena in consciousness, phantoms in the world? And what about the world itself? And all the events that occur?

M: Ponder over what I have said. Can you find a flaw in it? The physical body, which one generally identifies with oneself, is only the physical construct for the Prana (the life force) and consciousness. Without the Prana-consciousness what is the physical body? Only a cadaver! It is only because consciousness has mistakenly identified itself with its physical covering- the psychosomatic apparatus - that the individual comes into existence.

(To be continued)